The government's flagship HIV anti-retroviral programme has hit a major snag, with the Health Department instructing provinces not to put any more children on treatment.

Dr Nono Simelela, head of the HIV unit in the department, yesterday said the government had instructed provinces not to put children on treatment until it was clear that the anti-retrovirals could be supplied without interruption.

Simelela said the glitch was as a result of an "apparent incapacity" of the pharmaceutical industry to cope with the demand for anti-retrovirals.

"Demand for the anti-retrovirals far outstrips supply," she told The Star regarding the challenges brought by the rollout, announced by the cabinet in March. source...

Bush critics imperil Africa's AIDS victims

BY JAMES K. GLASSMANJames K. Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is from the Scripps Howard News Service. April 13, 2004

Few actions by President George W. Bush have infuriated opponents more than his initiative to help Africans and other poor people dying of AIDS.How dare this "compassionate conservative" usurp an issue that's rightfully theirs? source...

Cheaper Aids drug deal extended

Drugs to tackle HIV can be expensiveA deal giving cheaper Aids drugs to the developing world is being made available to hundreds of thousands more patients. source...

US warns world losing Aids fight

An estimated 40m people are infected with HIV worldwideThe American Health Secretary, Tommy Thompson, has warned that the world is losing the fight against Aids. source...

Africa isn’t dying of Aids

The headline figures are horrible: almost 30 million Africans have HIV/Aids. But, says Rian Malan, the figures are computer-generated estimates and they appear grotesquely exaggerated when set against population statistics source...

South Africa: Chronology of HIV/Aids Treatment Plan, August 2003 to April 2004 source...

The Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, published the following article in their "Inside Story" section of the main newspaper on July 9: 2000, the headline reading:

"Some observers are critical of HIV theory and they have a right to be heard"

By Neville Hodgkinson.

The huge flaws in the HIV theory go deeper than questions over the extent to which HIV is the cause of Aids, or the toxicity or effectiveness of drugs directed against the virus. Astonishingly, they challenge the very existence of the virus itself - and thus, the validity of the HIV test - as well as the multibillion-dollar industry producing pharmaceutical interventions for Aids. Some of the scientists contributing to President Thabo Mbeki's Aids Advisory Panel have been trying for more than a decade to demonstrate these flaws to the scientific community. No one would listen. None of the mainstream journals would publish their work. There was no discussion.

From the beginning, powerful political, social and commercial forces shaped Aids science, and the possibility that the HIV theory might be fundamentally wrong soon became scientifically unthinkable. This is one reason why Mbeki has incurred such incomprehension and criticism. Few of the doctors and scientists who signed last week's pro-HIV Durban Declaration know of the criticism to which the HIV theory has been subjected. There has been an information blackout by leading scientific journals such as Nature, which helped organise the declaration. source...